In a conventional M2M service, only M2M applications perform communications, for example, in an intelligent electric meter service managed by a grid company, only an application on an intelligent electric meter of a terminal is required to interact with an application on a server managed by the grid company. However, along with expansion of an M2M service, different M2M applications may be required to interact with each other, for example, an intelligent home appliance may enjoy not only online failure diagnosis and maintenance service provided by an intelligent home appliance company but also online movie service and the like provided by a video service provider. In a scenario of interactions among multiple M2M applications, an existing technical solution of only registering an application with a local Common Service Entity (CSE) may not meet a requirement of application discovery in a multi-application interaction scenario, and when M2M applications required to interact with each other are not registered with the same CSE, it is impossible to implement mutual discovery, which may make it difficult to implement interactions among the multiple applications.